Wouldn’t it be good if you could have one program that would do several useful things for your computer? Things such as optimizing it, cleaning it, and improving speed, reliability, privacy and security?

If this sounds good to you, then you might wanna take Glary Utilities for a test drive. While the name may not sound too exciting, it seems to be a very good, well programmed, well thought out, and most importantly of all, useful piece of software.

Its an all in one utilities suite that has some very useful things that most computer users are sure to find useful at some stage. This includes a disk cleaner for scanning for and removing junk temp files from your computer to free up valuable space. It also has a registry cleaner which so far seems pretty good compared to most ones i’ve tried out, just be careful and try not to delete anything you’re not absolutely sure about. If in doubt, you can make a backup first. Other features enable you to delete empty folders and dead shortcuts. (more…)

One of the most interesting things about writing on free programs that are available is that you can actually take a look at these programs and see what motivates the people that make them.   In the case of VicMan Software, the creators of My Pictures 3D, the motivation was what was perceived as being a dull selection of screensavers that were available with the typical Windows system.   What started out as a screensaver quickly developed into so much more and the eventual result was released on January 4th and labelled as version 1.2 of My Pictures 3D.
 
What My Pictures 3D is, quite simply, is an online gallery.  This gallery is something similar to what you would see if you walked into a small art gallery near your house that regularly exhibited different works of painters in a single room. You get to walk around the room and look at different paintings and that is exactly what happens in this program as well. The only catch is that instead of paintings, what you will be looking at is different favourites from your particular photo album on your hard drive and in addition to being able to look at them through the use of the program, you can also set the program as your screensaver to have others look at them when your screensaver is on.   It is an absolutely spectacular program that is available for free online.
 
More information can be found at http://www.mypictures3d.com/

Got a favorite website but you hate the look of it? Now you can make it how you want it to be!

Stylish is a Firefox extension that enables you to change the look of websites. For example you could change the default text and background colors to be light colored text on a dark background. You can do this either on a site by site basis or globally effecting all websites you visit.

If you visit http://userstyles.org/stylish/ there is a selection of user made styles for global use or for specific popular sites such as Youtube and Wikipedia. These are easily imported into the extension and can be easily enabled, disabled, or removed according to your own taste.

As well as working with Firefox it also works with Thunderbird, Flock, SeaMonkey, Mozilla Suite, and Songbird and can also change the look of all these programs.

I find this very useful if you spend a lot of time on sites such as Wikipedia and don’t like reading on a glaring white screen. Now you can change to a darker background and your eyes will thank you!

More info and download here.

In case you were looking for a card creator that would allow you to make attractive cards with varied styles and via different design tools then you should definitely check out the Easy Card Creator Professional 5.20.51 software. It is loaded with superlative features to make various professional cards that too fully customized as per your desire. You can impress you clients, make a pattern cards for your company and do much more. The software provides you with the tool for the graphic personalization of the cards and supports one click capturing of the Photos. The options are uncomplicated such that you can use them with ease and do not need to be a professional for operating it.

Easy Card Creator Professional 5.20.51 software is set with different options to let you make unlimited number of stylish and yet professional cards. With a pleasant outlook the software presents itself in front of you when you launch it. When the program is launched it shows you templates wizard to select for making the cards. You can select the one you want and the template is shown at the left middle of the screen.

You can place text on the card, put the logo of the company and change the picture for the background of the cards. You can set figures like rectangle, ellipse and also set the pictures of the employees if required. You can change the templates settings; you can open, clone, close or even change the orientation of the templates. The properties of each function that you use are shown on the right side for customize them. You can change the name of the font, color, size, alignment, etc of the text. You can customize both the sides of the cards and set the properties according to your requirements.

The program supports batch printings and also set the page before printing. It provides with easy features to record employee information as well as their pictures. The elaborated help file shows all the details relating to the program.

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Now you can get rid of your boring Start Menu; find the applications, configure settings, etc in an easy and effective manner. With the Vista Start Menu SE 2.7 software you would find it easy to find the required program with just one glance at the menu. It would provide you with a Start Menu section that looks amazing and makes programs very accessible. It would relieve you from clicking again and again for opening the required folder.

Vista Start Menu SE 2.7 software provides you with all new Start Menu for your PC. You can explore all the files and folders through the menu itself with few simple keystrokes. The appearance of the Start Menu is pleasant and gives a stylish look. Install and start working. It shows you all the applications and programs listed with it. Press the number assigned to the application or surf along it with the keys. You can straight search the program by typing any the keyword matching the name and it show the list of the related programs on the left top side of the screen. You can switch users, log off, shut down, restart, hibernate or have the stand by mode activated by pressing the keys assigned to it. When you click on any of the program on the right side it shows all its contents.

You are also provided with a Customize Wizard that lets you change the buttons and other features according to you’re convenience. Run, internet search, find the programs, files, etc easily and also you can go for the Quick Start, Auto run programs. You can reduce or increase the size of the Start Menu window. You would love to work with it as all would become easier and faster to operate.

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There are a number of different notes programs around and therefore in order to make the list of freeware programs a note program has to be particularly special in some way. Well, I think I can say with confidence that the PinNotes program is a very special one.  Not only is the program compatible with Windows Vista (something that a lot of different programs can not attest to as of yet), but it is also a program that allows you to use rich text support combined with different note colours in order to get exactly what you want.   It is a fantastic program because of the choice that it offers the user and this combined with the fact that the program is free is very good indeed.
 
The latest release of the PinNotes software was on December 7th and a number of new features were added.  You can now get to the website for the program directly from the about menu of the software and you can also create live links that are able to be opened by simply clicking on them in the actual note.   There is also a splash screen added for effect and a number of new options are now available for you to customize your notes to a greater degree.  All in all, this software continues to make great strides and it wouldn’t be that surprising if it quickly became one of the most popular notes software packages around.
 
More information can be found at http://www.pinnotes.co.uk/

The images that you take while traveling through scenic places with your beloved or celebrating any suspicious occasion are precious rather precious to most of us. What about making them more beautiful and attractive? You can make it possible by adding up frames to your images. Frame Maker Pro 2.41 software would assist you to have your pictures made rather amazing and eye catchy. The options that are presented by the program are simpler to use and the program can be operated by any normal computer user. The Help guide further assists you to work with the program so that you do not face any problems.

Frame Maker Pro 2.41 software is little time taking to download and smooth to install at the system. The software opens with a blank screen with the option placed rather neatly on it. You need to open the image for having the frame added to it. You can set the scaling for the images from the right side panel options. You can make the images Fit to window or enable the Interpolation. You can make then selection for the Frames from the given collection. Set the thickness of the frame, matte size and also make the selection of the Background. Making your picture look more attractive and to give it a complete feel you can add the inner border. Make it colorful experience as you can set the colors for inner border as well as for the background. Add various shapes for the frames and have different styles to be selected. You can change the height and width of the border, and also you can enable the Inner Contour or Outer Contour. Crop the picture and set the contrast, brightness according to your likes. Make the selection from the various Effects and also have the color balancing done. You can do wonders to make your pictures more memorable.

You and Frame Maker Pro 2.41 software can do wonders with the images that you have saved at your system. Add frames of different styles and have fun!

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Actual Planner is a powerful organizer that allows you to schedule tasks, generate your personal schedule, maintain your address book, maintain your blog and a lot more.

Pros: The application is an organizer of things to do. The usual facilities for maintenance of tasks, birthday/anniversary reminders and contacts management are there. Additionally writing to your blog page, maintaining it is easy too through this package. Maintain notes too created during the day. As the data is maintained in one database, it is easy to move back and forth between home and work computers.

It is possible to view tasks created over a span of time, It could just for the current day, the week, month or whatever. Complete contact details of your contacts can be created and viewed.

Notes are based on post-it like freeform pieces of texts that can be tacked on to a specific area. Obviously the notes can be about anything. Blog facilities include an editor that creates the html text necessary for posting at a site. Blog can be published at any of several popular blog sites.

The interface is simple and fairly easy to use, other forms and user screens that appear are easy to use too.

Cons: Nothing obviously problematic was noticed. Only issue to my mind was if this exact combination of aggregation is required by a large community of users. For the rest, there are several other packages available already.

Overall: Quite easy to use application. This is particularly useful for people who manage several blog sites. Overall, I would think, this is at the 4 star level.

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Wondershare Photo Collage Studio is a easy-to-use application that enables you to make high-quality collages and scrapbooks featuring your own family photos.

Pros: The application not only makes photo collages and scrapbooks but also greeting cards, calendar, posters and letter pages. What makes all this easy is the wonderful visual interface. For adding photos the full document structure in the windows directory ids visible. Photos can be just dragged into the work area. Some amount of polishing of the photos can be done. Usual crop, brightness and contrast adjustment, rotation/flip etc functions are available. Photos can be framed/masked/filtered too at this stage. A large selection, theme based is available.

Next step is to choose a template and layout and the drag photos into the template. Text, clipart, stamps can be added. A wide selection of pre-designed stuff of each category is available. Text editing, choice of fonts and font colors et add to the power one can use for manipulating text that goes onto the collage. Further decoration is added via a doodling tool. You create your own clip art/designs to be added to the collage. All these items are added in layers and these layer manipulations are possible too. That is a lot of creative options that are available.

The easy and intuitive visual interface and the simple workflows the program guides you through makes these artwork making very easy. Templates are arranged as wedding, birthday and such other themes, making it easy to choose from.

Cons: Did not find anything adverse, nothing that detracts from the value addition.

Overall: A highly visual, easy to use, intuitive package that makes creating collages, calendars, posters, greetings or writing stationary so much enjoyable. Positively a 5 star effort by the developers.

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For everyone that loved the previous version of digital designer and was waiting for the next release, here it is!  As of December 5 th, your waiting is over and with the version 2.3 release, LEGO has added a number of different things to their software package.  The most important thing that has been added to the package is a larger selection when it comes to selecting the pieces that you want to use in order to build your LEGO invention. While the inventory is still quite limited in relation to the full range of physical products that LEGO offers, one can expect the inventory to get better and better as time happens to go by.
 
For those of you that are new to LEGO digital designer, imagine having a software package that could bring your childhood memories to life in startling clarity and you have the LEGO digital designer! Play with the software in the same way that you would play with the bricks as a kid and you will find that the sky and your imagination are the only limits on what you can accomplish. Be warned though, this program can be quite addictive once you get started so don’t download it the night before a big test or a big presentation!
 
More information on this software can be found at http://ldd.lego.com/